Reading in School

Being Read to

Each day, class teachers read a story to the whole class to promote reading for pleasure and so children hear the key skill of prosody  (fluency and expression) being modelled. High quality texts are chosen and mapped across the year. Our aim is to develop a community of readers at St Martin’s and to ensure all children have enriching, stimulating and balanced reading opportunities. Adults also value the time spent sharing a story one to one with a child. 

In order to widen children’s experience of high quality texts and to enhance children’s love of reading, each class receives a book at the beginning of each month which is then placed into their class library for everyone to enjoy and share.

Reading Independently 

Every classroom has a book corner or reading area where children have free access to the texts. Children are encouraged to use these areas as much as possible. The importance of independent reading is recognised at St Martin’s and regularly integrated into the planning and delivery of lessons across the curriculum.

Reading with our buddies

The children in Year 6 are each buddied up with a child in Reception where they meet regularly to share books and play together.

Silver Readers

The school in part of the 'Silver Stories' scheme which is a charity based in Cornwall promoting communication across the generations.  Children (Silver Readers) are linked to older people (Silver listeners) around the country by telephone and read to them weekly.  The charity aims to combact lonliness and isolation that can be felt by older people, to create intergenerational relationships and to offer children a richer reading experience. 

Reading Practice and Guided Reading

Alongside teaching children to acquire the skills they need in order to be able to read, the school also develops children’s understanding of what they are reading through:-

• Recall and literal understanding
• Developing inference skills
• Ensuring children can make connections when reading
• Encouraging reading in order to learn

We understand the key role that prosody plays in building fluency and in turn developing comprehension.

In Reception and Year 1 whilst children are following the Little Wandle Programme they read 3 times a week in a small group. Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions use the same book each day but have been designed to focus on three different key reading skills:

• On the first day children will be focusing on becoming confident at  decoding: using phonics knowledge to read the words in the book.
• On the second day children will be learning to read the words with prosody: this is reading with intonation and expression
• On the third day children will be focusing on reading with comprehension: where they will be learning to understand the text and develop higher level thinking skills such as inference. 

From Year 2 upwards, children have three whole class guided reading sessions per week. These are based on a 'Talk 4 Reading' model which takes a close reading approach to develop deeper understanding of a text. High quality and aspirational texts are chosen and children are scaffolded to access them. The children are introduced to a text, take part in a range of activities to deepen their understanding and then apply this learning independently to demonstrate their understanding.